Multimedia distribution and consumption has a long history in the art. Numerous file formats, multimedia players, and even dedicated multimedia content providers exist. Common examples include file formats such as MPEG-4 (MP4), QuickTime (MOV), Audio-Video Interleave (AVI), Windows Media Video (WMV), and Shockwave/Flash (SWF) among many others. Common multimedia players include Windows Media Player, QuickTime, RealPlayer, WinAmp, and many others. Dedicated content providers include YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu, and many others.
Unfortunately, traditional multimedia is not constructed to support interactions beyond simple playback controls. There exists no way in which to allow a video producer, for example, to identify the items (such as the clothing worn by an actor) available for sale within the video, nor is there a way for the products to be purchased as the video plays. Similarly, there is no possibility with existing technologies to provide additional actions and annotations to video during playback.
Certainly, some technologies such as Adobe's Extensible Media Platform (XMP) allow detailed metadata to be bundled with multimedia files, but XMP does not allow temporal compression, scripted events, nor streaming delivery of metadata. Similarly, some systems such as YouTube allow some limited capabilities for annotating some interactive areas of videos with text or for redirection to a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and some social commenting on a video stream, but no file and player system includes a full capability suite for interaction, annotation, scripting, temporal compression, and streaming.